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Intel's 10-Core Xeon Processor Shipping Soon

Paul Lilly
Feb 18, 2011

Page 1 of 10

Intel's 8-core Nehalem-EX will be shoved aside as the chip maker's fastest server chip, conceding the performance crown to Westmere-EX, a 10-core Xeon processor. One of the talking heads at Intel said you can expect Westmere-EX to land in servers sometime in the first half of 2011, PCWorld reports. What isn't yet known is exactly how fast it will come clocked, only that it will outpace Nehalem-EX with two additional cores and improved latency.

As you might imagine, Westmere-EX is intended for high performance servers that need the additional horsepower, such as data centers maintaining large databases. Each of Westmere-EX's cores can run two threads, and since it will run in servers with up to eight sockets, there's potential for 160 simultaneous threads.

The 10-core Xeon chip is built using a 32nm manufacturing process, down from Nehalem-EX's 45nm, and is socket compatible with existing Nehalem-EX chips.

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